'Slippery Slope' instabilty is terrible for cliffside [merged]

Man what a disaster, me a good jumper after 100 attemps got only to second lvl, (you must do like 7), and that's only to first seals, ANET What is this, for a daily farmable dungeon... Wow. I hope you shut this one down ASAP, or make it combat only. It's terrible.

I hope this is sarcasm. The planks even push you left, and right of, thinking you are edging off, while you are straight on middle in cliffside. At least super adventure box has flat surfaces (even if meridiocal), so if you glide off you can jump back again.

I'm glad this is being looked at, but how long are we going to be waiting? I had already given up on the idea of running fractals tonight after reset, as the servers tend to be somewhat unstable on patch day, but I do fractals dailys...er..daily.

Yea slippery Slope is a pain at cliffside but with 2 mesmers we were SOMEHOW able to get thru the 1st part and after that it was easy to get up the rest of it and things went smooth. took only 30mins . Slippery Slope in Underground was fun with my group tho getting up the ramp at the end of the cage room was an excperience. We didnt have the bomb room so i can imagine that was annoying without ports/blinks trying to stealth. The idea is fun but maybe not for fractlas idk. https://tinyurl.com/y78mjves

I quite agree, this new instability was no fun for me for several reasons so i am gonna post the reasons why i dislike it. I am glad to read that the instability will be removed in cliffside, however i have the following issues with it:

1: Unable to walk over small obstacles
You cannot take any stairs, however small and tiny they are. If there is a random little stone you have to jump over it or slide around it. This makes it very annoying if you want to get somewhere and get to a halt for apparently no reason until you see an obstacle.

2) Unable to walk uphill
Even worse is the fact that you cannot walk uphill in any way without jumping, which makes you go uphill somewhat awkward, or dodging uphill, which again makes you very unstable on landing since you gathered a lot of momentum during the dodge any are likely to overshoot. This second point inparticular made it impossible for me to complete the cliffside fractal, but even the underground fractal was a pain due to the slight uphill ground near the edges of the arena which meant you could not stand still and hit the boss under some lava-containers. Apart from that, it was a difficult to even get up to the mechanism to empty the container. This brings me to my next reason:

3) Far noo much time needed + even simple tasks become a challenge
The new instability lengthens the fractal unnecessarily. With the new instability it took me over 20 minutes to beat the boss in the underground fractal. It was not because my group had any difficulties with the boss itself, but the instability made even simple tasks challenging (in a bad way) to fullfill. My goal is to run the dailies as well as the recommended fractals in an average time. I do not mind if a fractal is lengthened as it happened to the Molten Boss, as long as it has good reasons to require more time to beat. I am afraid to say this is not the case with this change.

4) No counterplay
What even adds to my frustration is the fact that there is nothing you can do to circumvent or handle the situation. There are a lot of mechanics to handle different instabilities ("No Pain No Gain" -> steal boons, "Social Awkwardness" -> Do not stack, "Last Laugh" -> get out of the aoe, "Flux Bomb" -> place the bomb away from the grout, etc. you get my idea). This instability is not cleansable, so there is nothing you can do about it.

That being said, i do not think the idea is generally bad. I liked the idea that the part in the underground fractal before Rabsovich was a bit more difficult and can imagine it being more challeging in dodging enemy attacks, but at this state it prevents me having fun because it makes the wrong things challenging.

In my opinion it is a change to the worse regarding the experience i had with the fractals and hope this instability gets a thorough revision.

Just did 81 dredge fractal (ice elemental with it), it was harder then a 100 cm, took 50 minutes. i hope this isn't the idea of instabilities. Only super flat ones, should have this one included, and never other hard instabilities).

For first 5 min this is fun instability, but when the mobs start to rage and hit you super hard, while you loose control, and your evades matter less (you slide back from slope into aoe often), this feels to punishing.

Can you PLEASE make it so that using stability nullifies the effect for its duration? Otherwise the 20% bonus means literally nothing.

This is honestly the worst instability in the game (FAR worse then the old SA) and not just for the two aforementioned "bugged" fractals but for any fractals with ramps or jumping, Uncatagorized and Jade Maw come to mind, it's also very annoying to play melee with it but perhaps that one's intentional.

At least if stability protected us from it we could use stab to go up hills or across jumps instead of sliding off the edge like we're all wearing lubed up bowling shoes on a skating rink filled with loose marbles...

You can dodge to move without slippery slope momentarily, useful for going up any slopes. We prototyped with stability removing the slipping originally, but it felt worse because you would randomly switch in and out of slipping mode as people applied stability to you.

Not really, cause if you move, for a second dont move, no doding, jumping, or forward pressing is gonna save you, you slide back no matter what. And dodging (except on thief, wich is now very tempting cause of this patch), is required for a lot of stuff: dredge ice elemental freeze row: dodge or die (6x 5000 damage). If you then dodge to move, and then fail to dodge another freeze row or 'ice from the sky spike' attack, dead, downed. have you tried ressing someone? There 5 aoe around the person but he's not in aoe, you have small landing window. No slipery, Piece of cake, finetune movement now? Next to impossible, dodge is to far or to close, and moving will slide you in the aoe. Conclusion: you almost have to let the person die, to save your own kitten, unless you have an invulnerability. look man, this year i'm gonna finish all SAB ap (that means all worlds 16x tribulation, i know the kitten this jumping style does. if it's only dodge, + casual monster, it's ok. Also SAB was MADE for this, with backup zones, to stop you from sliding down, this is not the case in fractals, as lot of hallways go perma down. IF you slide down, you cannot stop it EVER, you can only slow it. That kills reactional gameplay. Jump puzzles luckely are not much about reactional gameplay, they are about finding a flow of precise keystrokes so you can get to next checkpoint. There you are also not slowed down by combat or cripple, wich is the case in fractals. Do you know what killed me one attempt on Ice elemental endboss dredge? 0 endurance left, 20 secs chilll (engineer when focussed on damage has very bad condi removal), and 2 aoes coming at you. especially with upgoing hill in front of you, forget about it, one mistake and you slide back in aoe, dodge? nope, move fast out? nope (chill).

i know you love challenging content benjamin. You are one of the few in guild wars 2 team that seem to do. That is good, and i like it. But i urge you to invite Gaile and rubi and complete with them fractal 81 dredge, with ice ele spawning. Something tells me (my 1000+ daily fractals history experience, with the good, ugly, bad, good and beautiful), that it's not gonna work out fine. Imagine trying that every day, would you like it? I don't think so. Fracs are hard enough as it is. Fractals CM are challenging Without kill proof when i started to get in cm groups, it was a challenge to get it ever properly started 2 months ago, but I went all out for it. some runs took 2 hours. look where i'm now, 110 kill proof, didnt skipe a day but Christmas.

I choose 100 cm with social awkwadness, afflicted, and the one that makes you move slower when you take damage, any day over sliperly slope. And trust me, the ones i just pointed out are a pain.

i hate the amount of original strength of guild wars 'reaction freedom', this removes. Heal party? cant, they all slip in different direction, people not healed, (damage by ranged stuff or instabilities, like afflicted), die slowly. Dodge? you can't waste them. So useles to counter, plus if you move upward, then fail and go downward, an upward dodge will fail to keep you moving upward. Only perma correct jumping without ever failing, keeps you going forward. I wanna focus at the threat at hand, not the 'annoyance' (sliperly slope).

@Benjamin Arnold.3457 said:
You can dodge to move without slippery slope momentarily, useful for going up any slopes. We prototyped with stability removing the slipping originally, but it felt worse because you would randomly switch in and out of slipping mode as people applied stability to you.

Can you tell us if slippery slope is enabled on Deepstone, Chaos, Shattered Observatory (Arkk Platforms), Solid Ocean, Uncategorized or even Thaumanova/Volcanic? Because all of those fractals have jumping or platform segments to them and I can easily see people opting to skip over them because of this instability.

Our group wasted a solid 30 minutes trying to get up the first set of ramps in cliffslide (see what i did there?) before giving up, even tried using multiple mesmer portals to no avail, I can't imagine this with Social Awkwardness or on Uncategorized.

@Benjamin Arnold.3457 said:
Slippery slope was not supposed to be included on cliffside, we will remove it in a future patch.

You sure? Sounds like you're using us as QA

Since it happened almost everytime in the past I guess it's the same story here especially when knowing that a lot of the company staff isn't able to playing challenging content at all. Who should test things if not us.

Some people have a weird understanding of fun or challenging.
This contraption is in no way fun or challenging. It is just time consuming, agonizing, arduous, awful, dire, distasteful and a lot more synonyms.
Almost feels like the one who came up with it is just mocking the players. Come to think of it, this must be it.

My second thought (after going Cliffside with this instability ):
Yeah, they are either going to remove it or restrict it in certain fractals.

I'm currently split in totally removing it or restricting. While I'm fine with slippery in certaim fractals, I know it would trigger a ton of players. Maybe stability could negate this, that would add an extra element of build an adaptation.

I like the new instabilities which rewards you for good play and punishes you if you ignore them. But this? I see no scenario where this could be fun. Most fractals require precise movement out of aoe, mini-jumping puzzles during boss fights etc. Last night my static did slippery slope Underground Facility T4 and let me tell you, after our mesmer's maniacal laughter subsided in Discord it turns out it was no fun at all. The carry-the-rifle-up-the-slope event was infuriating; and we got mass tilted at the last boss when someone had to go flip the molten ore switch on the upper catwalks (luckily DH's greatsword's #3 leap and warrior's greatsword #5 rush were of great help there). And the most cringy part was that you couldn't avoid the aoe because you were sliiiiiiiiding while rezzing someone became a real chore: I'm coming to rezz ya, woops, no, I'm in Africa now, hope you rally buddy. We lost 30 minutes on a this kitten instability. If you do a fractal with this instability bring a party full of mesmers and thieves to portal and blink around while keeping WASD movement to a minimum. And hope they will remove it. Yes please, remove it!

@Benjamin Arnold.3457 said:
Slippery slope cannot appear in solid ocean, uncategorized, thaumanova, or volcanic. In some fractals we have also added exclusion zones, such as the jumping bits in Chaos.

Could you guys play test more fractals before shipping the new instabilities next time? For example, I do not see Swamp in your list. And experienced fractal players know that for the starting 3 wisps event, there are certain wisps that require jumping up the trunks of trees to get to the cleft before the timer expires if you do not have someone with a portal in the group. You cannot realistically require a group to have a profession with portal just for a pre-event.

@Anet: Can the exclusions be listed in the patch notes please - or in the in-game mouse-over tool tip? Be great to officially see a list of intended exclusions for each fractal (or possibly fractal settings ui, as a mouse hover-over with a list of potential Instabilities).

Is Bird Instability intended for Swampland? The fractal mechanics become literally saving dodges to use them exclusively when nearly-invisible birds are on you, and fighting raves countless times over and over again - for approx 30 mins. Why not complete the Troll'ing and make them invuln outside the green-areas?

Seriously, 10g for 2h of time is enough to make me post in forums for the first time in 6 years - maybe even quit fractals. I'd love to see more dynamic builds usable in any fractal - I hope the goal of fractals does not change to full re-spec each fractal/boss to complete them.

Omg, flux bomb (the super long one on chaos) without even playing it, i know it will be terrible there. (people respond slow to flux bomb there, with the slow sliding effect at start, ppl can no longer ultra fast go away, this means they will have to double dodge it away, with for sure taking damage from the flux maybe even downin in it preventing ress capability. Or the confusion trap floor at end boss, when split in small sections... you will slide into damage, or knockback from monsters. Don't you even playtest your kitten. If this was a ONE time going, one time achievement to do all fracs in this, i would be ok with this, but this is daily content. This is more terrible then Dhuum CM.

Volcanic wasn't that bad, actually. Just spike down the barrier at each phase, then back up to range to keep all the elementals in front of you. My PUGs didn't really have an issue with it and they struggled on much easier parts of other Fractals.

Social Awkwardness is fun, though. Bumper cars! Definitely not enjoying any part of Slippery Slope...

With insts like SLIPPERY SLOPE and OUTFLANKED, fractal experience has become very annoying for pro teams, and impossible for regular pugs.
and that without considering many of the new possible combos, like slippery + social awk.

The old Social Akwardness is gone, though. Things should be even easier now for the general pug once some of the overtuned stuff is toned down a little and once certain instabilities are removed from half of the levels.

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. ~ Robert Heinlein

@Memoranda.9386 said:
Volcanic wasn't that bad, actually. Just spike down the barrier at each phase, then back up to range to keep all the elementals in front of you. My PUGs didn't really have an issue with it and they struggled on much easier parts of other Fractals.

Social Awkwardness is fun, though. Bumper cars! Definitely not enjoying any part of Slippery Slope...

I think the change on Social Awkwardness can be seen this way or that way problem is stacking became really impossible also you can kick someone into an aoe or over the edge.

What I'm really see as problematic is "Boon Overload" I can't see me as Ele doing a fractal with it without boons I can't do (much) dmg and with it I die instantly. I don't know if they stack by adding or multiplication ? Anyway it doesn't make much different in the range I calculated with 6 you have 30% more dmg incoming but with 10 it already 50(64)% more dmg this should be enough to get down with one hit .

@Benjamin Arnold.3457 said:
Slippery slope was not supposed to be included on cliffside, we will remove it in a future patch.

You sure? Sounds like you're using us as QA

Since it happened almost everytime in the past I guess it's the same story here especially when knowing that a lot of the company staff isn't able to playing challenging content at all. Who should test things if not us.

Define challenging content. Some of the fractals here, infact all mentioned have no cm and really the diff this isntab creates between cm or not isnt that big. The main "issue" is in sections with tight jumps so i assume by challenging content u mean devs do no jps.

@Memoranda.9386 said:
Volcanic wasn't that bad, actually. Just spike down the barrier at each phase, then back up to range to keep all the elementals in front of you. My PUGs didn't really have an issue with it and they struggled on much easier parts of other Fractals.

Social Awkwardness is fun, though. Bumper cars! Definitely not enjoying any part of Slippery Slope...

I think the change on Social Awkwardness can be seen this way or that way problem is stacking became really impossible also you can kick someone into an aoe or over the edge.

What I'm really see as problematic is "Boon Overload" I can't see me as Ele doing a fractal with it without boons I can't do (much) dmg and with it I die instantly. I don't know if they stack by adding or multiplication ? Anyway it doesn't make much different in the range I calculated with 6 you have 30% more dmg incoming but with 10 it already 50(64)% more dmg this should be enough to get down with one hit .

Boon Overload should be reduced to 3-3.5%

Is it not possible to cc and blind mobs so the incease matters very little? Its not the first time we have to deal with crazy 1 shotting mobs (remember the ascalon fractal?) The pull blind cleave method worked well.

@Cyninja.2954 said:
My initial thougt:
Nice, all these years of SAB have payed off.

My second thought (after going Cliffside with this instability ):
Yeah, they are either going to remove it or restrict it in certain fractals.

I'm currently split in totally removing it or restricting. While I'm fine with slippery in certaim fractals, I know it would trigger a ton of players. Maybe stability could negate this, that would add an extra element of build an adaptation.

IIrc they did have it being negated by stab iternally and it proved abit random. I can see it working well when theres like a jumping puzzle or a positioning intense part so the group stacks stab before but theres also abit or random stab being thrown out and that in fights with aoes etc could lead into some randomness.